NB: This post was first published last year. Anyone who survives the Gulag to write brilliantly and courageously about it deserves a re-post. It’s the birthday of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008, #nicelonglifeinspiteofallthattimeinsovietprisoncamps), whose works of fiction and nonfiction brought international attention to conditions in the camps under Stalin, and no, we don’t mean the kind of [...]
It’s the birthday of the first woman—and the first Swede—to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1909), Selma Lagerlöf (1858-1940). Lagerlöf was born and raised in Mårbacka, a mansion located on an estate in Värmland, Sweden. (For crying out loud. Who has time for all these diacritics?) She grew up in a large family, and [...]
It’s the birthday of Doris Lessing (1919-2013), whose novels and stories broke literary ground in their daring explorations of racism, women’s inner lives, sex, mental illness, and all manner of upheaval known to humankind. Lessing was best known for her semi-autobiographical and experimental novel The Golden Notebook (1962) and was awarded the Nobel in Lit [...]
It’s the birthday of T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), whose works such as “The Waste Land” and Four Quartets established him as the greatest poet of the 20th century, though emphatically not, it must be admitted, the most cheerful. Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the sixth child of parents who were actually transplanted [...]
It’s the birthday of German Nobel laureate Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), noted for his novels about the search for authenticity and self-awareness—Demian (1919), Siddhartha (1922), Steppenwolf (1927), The Glass Bead Game (1943), and like that—so if you know any angsty adolescents with a literary bent please forward this post and do mention Demian in particular, which [...]
It’s the birthday of French intellectual, philosopher, novelist, and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), who in 1964 was offered the Nobel Prize in Literature but turned it down, like you do, because he didn’t want to be “transformed into an institution.” He also rejected the Legion of Honor for being too bourgeois, though I think he [...]
It’s the birthday of William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), one of the greatest poets of the 20th century and someone who, more than 75 years after his death, “still towers among the giants of world literature” (see article here). I know what you’re thinking: is Yeats Yeats, or is Yeats Keats? Here’s a handy guide to [...]
It’s the birthday of novelist Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972), the first Japanese author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1968). (The other two Japanese authors to win the Nobel in lit are Kenzaburō Ōe, 1994, and Kazuo Ishiguro, 2017, although maybe he shouldn’t count since he was born in Japan but raised in the UK, [...]
It’s the birthday of one of the greatest authors of the 20th century, Saul Bellow (1915-2005), who in 1976 won the Nobel Prize for Literature and who on his deathbed asked, “Was I a man or was I a jerk?” (Spoiler alert: he was a jerk.) His novels, often set in post-WWII Chicago, were electric, [...]
It’s the birthday of José Echegaray y Eizaguirre (1832-1916), who was the major Spanish dramatist of his day. He was a math professor and government worker (finally becoming minister of finance) and had his first play produced at 42. After that he was hugely prolific and fantastically popular, won the Nobel Prize for lit in [...]
It’s the birthday of one of Japan’s most important authors, Kenzaburo Oe (b. 1935), who won Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize for his short story “The Catch” (1957) and who won the Nobel in 1994. His work reflects the disillusionment and ambiguities of his post-WWII generation as well as the difficulties of his own life, including [...]
It’s the birthday of Caribbean-born poet and playwright Derek Walcott (1930-2017), who won the Nobel in 1992 and whose work has been called “a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment” (Nobel committee). (Anytime your work is described as an “oeuvre” instead of a mere collection, [...]